Academic peer review is the process by which professors critique their colleagues’ research to determine whether the research is of sufficient quality to be published in a journal and thus made available for public consumption.
Contemporary peer review is littered with many issues. It is often slow. Some submissions might take several months to a year or more to proceed through the review process. And this is just for a single submission of a paper. Some papers will need to be submitted to multiple journals before they are finally published. By the time a study’s results appear online or in-print, the study itself is often a distant memory for the researcher.
One reason why review times are slow is because journals are inundated with submissions, and there are too few volunteer reviewers and editors to handle them. This then causes delays in getting scientific results out to the public – something that is highly problematic given that most universities and research projects are funded by taxpayers.
Peer review is also highly flawed in the sense that many papers that make it through peer review, and are published, are not necessarily credible. The reviewers may have done a poor job at appraising the study’s methods and results. Evidence of this issue in peer review comes from cheeky experiments, where researchers purposely set out to test the replicability of peer review, and find that if an already published paper is anonymised and sent back out for peer review, the paper is often rejected the second time around. This is perhaps unsurprising given that even with a single submission that involves 2-4 peer reviewers, the reviewers will often disagree about whether the paper should be accepted for publication.
Moreover, the existence of letters to the editor, which are a form of post-publication review, is also an admission that peer review is imperfect, otherwise there would be no need for a reader to comment on a paper after it has been published. Yet, thousands of critical letters are published each year. Also, each year, hundreds of already published papers are retracted because of issues with data credibility and analysis, which are realised only after publication.
A final set of factors that impacts the purity of peer review is the whims, biases, and incompetencies of the professors who review and edit papers. As an author of over 70 papers, I have been on the receiving end of many of these whims, biases, and incompetencies. Here, my aim is to provide evidence of this by sharing six stories of my personal experiences with peer review. My goal in sharing these stories is to enhance understanding of some of the problems that exist within the peer review system and to provide examples of the difficulties that researchers experience when writing papers on “controversial” topics.
Story 1: Woke resignation
The first story is the most recent and perhaps most unique and dramatic. The relevant paper has been accepted for publication and will be available online later in 2024. In the paper, I use quantitative techniques to document the rise of, what I call, Woke medicine. (“Woke” refers to a heightened awareness of supposed social injustices, which are believed to be caused by power dynamics in society.)
After receiving editor desk rejections from a couple of journals, I contacted the editor of a journal where I had previously published a “controversial” paper. I asked the editor if he would consider publishing my new paper. He indicated that he might be willing to publish the paper after it had undergone peer review. So, I submitted the paper to the editor, and after a short time, I received feedback from reviewers. I made some minor changes based on their feedback and then resubmitted the paper to the editor.
After not hearing from the editor for several days, I decided to email him to confirm that he received the revised version of my paper and that my paper was still being considered for publication by the journal. Within 20 minutes, the editor responded. He stated that he had received the revised version of the paper and that his decision was to accept the paper for publication.
I would have been happy to close my email for the evening after reading that piece of good news, but I could see that the editor’s email continued for a few more sentences. So, I kept reading.
In those sentences, the editor informed me that one of the female staff in the journal’s editorial office decided to resign because of my paper.
“What?!” I thought to myself.
I then emailed the editor back, asking for clarification. The editor revealed to me that the assistant was, herself, Woke, and that she had said that she could no longer work for the journal in good conscience if my paper was going to be being published there.
The editor did not tell me who the assistant was, but I figured it out based on the limited information available in our email exchange and based on the staff biographies on the journal’s website. The woman’s biography was filled with Woke words and concepts – most of which were included in my analysis. The editor informed me that this was not the only disagreement that he had with this staff member based on her Woke views. Although, due to cowardice, there are many losses suffered in the battle for reason within academia, here, the editor deserves credit for having a spine and not letting a Woke activist influence his editorial decision.
So, that is Story 1 of Nuzzo’s adventures in academic peer review. Stay tuned in the coming days for Story 2. And watch out for my paper on Woke medicine later this year…that is, assuming some other drama does not arise in the meantime and prevent it from being published.
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Personal drama in academic peer review: Story 1 – Woke resignation